5. Australia – South Coast and back to Perth

Covering 20 September to 27 September 2019

storm clouds on the way , Fitzgerald National Park

Only a few days ago we’d been in 35C heat but now on the coast of The Fitzgerald NP we were enjoying hail.  It was freezing, we were on a National Park site with no electricity and blessed with a van heating system that only works on mains power.  It was so cold that I slept wearing a hat and on a morning which was gloriously sunny we just drove to get the van heater working before we stopped to have breakfast.  Shower ? Ha !

Miley's Beach, Fitzgerald NP

not a coast to be wrecked on

This is a huge NP and to be fair, in the time we spend in each of the National Parks we cannot do any of them justice.  It’s all a bit like a tiny taster selection at a restaurant with a huge menu.  We get an impression, some fine views and some good flowers but there is just so much we know we’re missing.  In what seems like an age ago in Perth we picked up a leaflet for a wildflower exhibition in a place called Ravensthorpe.  Knowing we weren’t going there we threw the leaflet away only three or four days ago and yep, here we are driving through the place.  I must say it is difficult to exaggerate just how much the wild flowers are celebrated in Western Australia.  Any tourist office can tell you where to go to see them and draw on a map where some good spots are.  The exhibition in Ravensthorpe (35^th year) was in the village hall with hundreds of labelled wild flowers from the area.  It runs for nearly two weeks and there were still plenty of visitors on the last day.  This small town even has several rooms of the village hall dedicated to it’s own herbarium, with a proper collection of specimens and several microscopes so there are serious botanists around.  It is the sheer variety that’s so staggering.  Before we came to Australia I’d thought there were a few species of Eucalyptus trees in existence.  Totally wrong.  Just in the Shire of Ravensthorpe there are 104 different species of Eucalyptus, 12 of which are endemic and so grow in the wild nowhere else in the world.  Overall, there are about 700 different species of Eucalyptus.

this is the entire hotel at Ongurup, on the way to the Sterling Ranges

approaching Mount Trio Camp

Candy Orchid

Turning back, we head west to The Stirling Ranges, another isolated group of mountains.  I call these various ranges mountains because they regularly have summits of 3.000 feet even though the length of the range may only be fifty miles or so.  In the Stirlings we stayed on a sprawling campsite attached to a farm with a huge area of light woodland next to it with fifty or so species of orchids having been found in it.  We went on a walk guided by the farmer and with a couple of Americans who described themselves as hard-core orchid people.  The Australian drought has hit many places very hard and this site had a dried up river bed twenty feet or so wide running along one side.  The farmer told us that it used to flow between three and nine months of the year but hasn’t had water since 2006.  Many, many trees were dead.

Zebra Orchid

a good pitch at Mount Trio Camp 

a Kangaroo who didn't want to be near us

From Western Australia we were going eastwards to South Australia by air from Perth.  So we necessarily had a convoluted route along the south and then west coast to get ourselves back to Perth for our flight.  It was a few days to get to the south-westernmost point of the mainland where the Great Southern and Indian Oceans meet.  After this we had to go north and managed to fit in a really good coastal walk.  There were even more Humpback Whales migrating south than we saw nearly three weeks ago in Kalbarri.  The ‘coast road’ is not on the coast which is what we’d hoped and expected, it just happens to be the road nearest to the coast and is often several kilometres away from the sea.

Sugarloaf Rock near Cape Naturaliste

Our flight to Adelaide was mid-afternoon so we were in no hurry to get too close to Perth, stopping for the night about three or four hours drive away.  Fortunately there was an internet signal so we did get to see the evening e-mail telling us that our flight had been cancelled.  Our on-board travel guru Heather sorted it out and even got us an earlier plane.  This was great except that we had to get up at 5.30am in order to drive to Perth, sort out the handing back van stuff and get to the airport.   

It continues to be a mystery to me why airlines still think they have to produce something hot as a meal substitute when a decent sandwich and a drink would almost always suffice.  On the way to Adelaide the hot ‘meal’ was something called a pie floater which seems to be an Australian peculiarity.  I considered ‘speciality’ but ‘peculiarity’ fits better.  It appears to be some sort of meat pie on a bed of loose set mushy peas.  I turned down the opportunity but the passenger next to me had it and I swear it looked like dog-sick with a slab of wet cardboard laid on the top.  It made the cabin stink like a cheap pie shop.  Fortunately, being on an earlier flight meant we were able to get a proper meal in a restaurant just along the road from our hotel in central Adelaide.

The Great Southern Ocean struttin' its stuff at Cape Naturaliste